It ain’t a chapter I much like to discuss, but I promised I’d tell you the truth, my friend, and hold nothing back.
The truth is, I fell into some fool argument with a shopkeep up in Helena. I can’t remember what the argument was all about now. I guess it don’t matter, anyway. The end result was this: I took a hatchet to his store and busted the place up—broke his shelving, ruined much of his stock—scared the piss right out of him, too. Don’t laugh, for it ain’t funny—and I ain’t one speck proud about my actions. What I done to that shopkeep was cruel and stupid—behavior better fitting Frank Lacy or Bill Steers than the legendary Calamity Jane. I was promptly arrested, which came as no great shock to me… but what happened in that jail was a real surprise, and no mistake.
By the time they tossed me in the pen and locked the bars behind me, I looked so ill that the jailer called in a doctor. That kindly old fella looked me over and asked me questions about my habits and my health, which I answered amiably enough. Then he excused himself. The jailer let him out of my cell, and both men stepped through a nearby door into the dim little hall that adjoined the jailhouse proper. But the door to the hallway didn’t close all the way; it hung ajar by a hand’s breadth, and so I could hear their conversation.
“She has rheumatism,” the doctor said. “Unsurprising in a woman of sixty or seventy—and she certainly appears to be sixty-five at least, if one trusts one’s eyes. But she insists that she is fifty-one years of age.”
“Rheumatism never made anyone look so sickly,” the jailer said.
“No—certainly not. I’m afraid she has fallen under the grip of a far more serious illness. She is terribly jaundiced; I suspect disorder of the bile. Perhaps a liver malady. Whichever the case, the disease is well advanced. I’m afraid the poor woman doesn’t have long to live.”
Not long to live.
I huddled on the narrow cot in a corner of my cell, stunned and shivering in the silence. Whatever the jailer and the doctor said after that, I cannot say, for I had ceased to listen. All my thoughts turned inward, squarely facing the fact of my imminent demise. And you know, after the first few minutes of panic and denial, that doctor’s certainty settled over me like a loving embrace, warm and calming. No one can dodge death forever. At least I knew the hour—or had some vague idea of the hour. I could make my preparations—set to rights whatever could be righted, and meet death with a wink and a slap of my palm. How many folks could claim such good fortune?
That very day, I made up my mind that when my end came, I would be close to Wild Bill. I hoped that the proximity of our respective deaths would make it easier for me to find him—pave a path of sorts down which I could walk, a free-striding spirit, and find him there at the end of my trail with the red sunset a-glowing on his long red hair. And so I would return to Deadwood, where my heart had died so many years before. Let my body fall where it would; my spirit would remain in Deadwood forever.
Before I could reach the mercy of forever, I must part with Jessie for good. I had left her well alone, all those many years since I sent her off to Sturgis, and she seemed better off without me—thriving as no Canary had done before. I couldn’t bring myself to break that habit now, and give her my farewell face to face. She would ask questions I couldn’t answer, and the look in her eyes would surely kill me long before I reached Wild Bill’s grave. But as soon as the sheriff released me, I disguised myself in a dark dress and wrapped a shawl around my head, so I looked like a bent old grandmother. Then I sought out the finest seamstress’s shop in all of Helena and I set upon the sidewalk across the street. There I found Jessie at her work.
For hours, pinned to my place by love and awe, I watched my girl from the shelter of my disguise. She was lively and slim, dressed in a beautiful frock of rose pink, and I smiled at the sight of her, tucking and pinning the dresses she had made for her customers, frowning in concentration over her work, laughing with the grand old dame to whom she had sworn her apprenticeship. Jessie looked plum happy—something I had never been. She had flourished into womanhood—beautiful and strong, untroubled by the misdeeds of her infamous relation. I was glad of it.
All that day, I set upon the sidewalk and watched my girl through the shop window, for whenever she was near the glass, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. But whenever her duties carried her out of sight, into the bowels of the seamstress’s workshop, I scribbled and scratched at a letter to Lije.
I’m dying, I told him. And I aim to be in Deadwood when death comes for me. You was always a good brother to me—you and Cilus. Tell the girls I love them, too, and kiss their children for me. Tell them everything I ever done, I done for their sake.
When the sun set, just before the seamstress closed up her shop, I watched Jessie sweep the floor, radiant in her rose-pink dress with her blackbird curls spilling down her back. Then she turned away to blow out the lamp, and I kissed my fingers in her direction. I rose from the sidewalk and made my way to the train station. I boarded a train bound for Deadwood, and never looked back.
Proper sickness had set in by the time the train reached its destination. My stomach churned so bad, I could scarce make myself swallow my own spit, and my eyes was bleary, stinging from a terrible dryness. I felt unaccountably weak—wobbly and frail, like a kitten that ain’t had time enough to open its eyes. It was all I could do to haul myself off that train. I carried one small carpet bag stuffed with my few insignificant possessions—among them, a battered old copy of The Beautiful White Devil of the Yellowstone, for with the snake ring long since departed, that damn-fool book was the last reminder I had of Wild Bill and the life we had shared. I leaned against a lamp post on the platform, wheezing for my breath, wondering where I ought to stay. I had almost no money left, nothing to my name.
When I felt steady enough to walk, I inquired here and there and found a room in a very inadequate boarding house, which I could afford for two weeks—no longer. I reasoned Death had better step lively if he wanted to take me in my bed. If he was delinquent in making his appearance, he would have to claim me in a gutter or an alley. I didn’t mind, so long as I was near Wild Bill’s grave when the call came—but I reasoned Death might prefer a more dignified state of affairs.
Well, I set myself up in that mildewed boarding house to wait my ending. That strange weakness crept back over me, so even setting up in my bed took a great deal of effort, a fixity of will I never knew I possessed. I did my best to sip at the broth the mistress of the house brought, but my stomach roiled with sickness no matter what I contrived to put in it. It was no great surprise when I began coughing up blood. I took it calmly, dabbing at my mouth with a dirty old kerchief, and in between my bouts of coughing, reading from that tattered book, remembering a time when I was young and free, when the mountains sang their hymns for me and the sky threw wide its arms in welcome.
The second week of my habitation dawned. Death still hadn’t made his appearance, and I was growing impatient, but there did come a tap upon the boarding-house door. Because I had nothing else to do, I strained to listen in on the conversation. I heard the mistress’s low, melodious voice, and then the higher strains of a younger woman. I could just hear their words over the sounds of Deadwood growing, Deadwood eating my memories.
“I’ve come to see Calamity Jane. She is boarding here, is she not?”
“Yes, but I don’t think she’s in a fit state for visitors.”
I sighed and sank back on my pillow. Just another writer, come to observe the spectacle of my death—come to pen another scurrilous column about my life.
“Please, ma’am,” the younger woman said. “If she’s ill, then it’s all the more urgent that I see her. She is my grandmother.”
A few moments later, a timid rap sounded at my bedroom door. I tried to push myself up again, but my arms quivered too much to hold me. I whispered, “Come in,” and she heard me despite the frailty of my voice. The door swung open—there she was, standing in its narrow frame, looking down at me with her girlish
brow furrowed and her dark eyes brimming with unshed tears.
I couldn’t speak a word. She was tall and beautiful—so beautiful, like my mother had been, and for one dizzy moment I even thought she was my mother, come back to guide me to the end of my road. But my ma had never stood so straight and determined. Ma’s face, pretty as it was, had never held Jessie’s radiance, that surety of purpose. Jessie was a woman now, confident and strong, proudly upright. She could look any man or woman directly in the eye.
“I found you,” she said.
I nodded.
She glanced around the small, dim bedroom, sniffed the air—heavy with the odors of mildew and dust, the odors of my sickness. “You can’t stay in this place,” Jessie said. “Look at it.”
“Don’t matter none. It’s all I can afford, anyhow.”
She came to me. She sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand, held it in both of her own. She was warm and alive; I could feel a great current of passion running through her, the energetic trembling of her hands.
“Uncle Lije wrote to me,” she said. “He told me you weren’t well, and had gone to Deadwood. I came to find you, for he said you…” She swallowed hard, took a deep breath to steady herself. “He said you might not have much longer on this earth.”
Again I nodded. I squeezed her hand, though even I could tell my grip was feeble.
Jessie sniffed, but she wouldn’t allow a tear to fall. She couldn’t look at my face, and I don’t blame her for that. I must have looked a wreck by then, sallow and thin, ravaged by the long years. But she said, “I can’t allow you to do this alone. To die alone. You’re… you’re my mother. Aren’t you?”
The moment hung between us, silent, heavy with all the words I had longed to say to her from the moment of her birth till now. How heavy and how beloved was that burden—everything I had left unsaid. It leaned its cruel and beautiful weight upon my chest till I could scarcely breathe.
At last I managed, “How did you know? Lije told you, didn’t he?”
“No. He kept your secret, though God alone knows why you wanted it to remain a secret, all these years. All my life.” She shook her head; those black curls swayed, just like my beautiful ma’s had done, long, long ago. “Lije wrote and told me, ‘Your grandmother is dying down in Deadwood. You had best get down to see her, and make your final good-bye.’ And I knew in that moment—I can’t say how—I just knew the truth. I saw it all plainly. I suppose some part of me has always known—ever since you sent me off to that boarding school in Sturgis. But it doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. I don’t mind that you kept it a secret. You had your reasons; that’s good enough for me.”
Poor Jessie—she couldn’t remain mistress of her tears any longer. They broke like a river in flood, breaching its banks, washing her smooth cheeks. The tears ran faster than she could wipe them way.
“But I would have liked to have known sooner,” she said, weeping, holding tight to my hand. “I would have liked to have called you Mother.”
I raised my trembling arm, though it cost me a reserve of my fading strength. Jessie lay down beside me, tucking herself into my embrace. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I laid my cheek against her warmth—my daughter, my child, the hope of my life.
“You were always good to me, in your way,” Jessie said. “Life was never easy for you, I know. But you were always good to me. You always kept me safe.” Her body shook with a brief laugh, bittersweet. “Do you remember that terrible night in Billings? At the hotel, when those bad men kept shooting at one another? I thought the gunfire would never stop. But I wasn’t as afraid as I might have been, because you were there, protecting me. I always felt safe when your arms were around me… Mother.”
She sobbed and pressed herself closer, and I rocked my baby girl as much as I was able, laid out as I was, with her all growed up beside me.
“I remember how we used to ride,” Jessie said, calmer now, with a fond smile in her voice. “I loved to ride with you, because you told such wonderful stories and you sang to me. Do you remember the song?”
I nodded, but my heart was too constricted by love for me to speak, let alone sing in my cracked, inadequate voice.
My girl sang instead, high and sweet. “She’s a big lass, and a bonny lass, oh and she likes her beer. And her name is Cushie Butterfield, and I wish she were here.”
I closed my eyes and listened till the song was done.
Jessie took an adjoining room in that miserable house, and paid my way for another two weeks just in case I needed them. She tended to my every need, no matter how foul and futile my situation became, as if she was the mother and I the helpless child. She never complained once, nor showed the least sign of resentment, and every day was blessed by her hand, warm and soft upon my brow.
I grew weaker, as you might expect. But with my girl beside me, singing the old songs and reciting my old tales, I found that every few days my strength would rally. On those days I took myself out walking—sometimes with Jessie holding my elbow, fearful I would fall, and sometimes (when Jessie fell exhausted into sleep) with only a walking stick to support me. I was obliged to move slow, to set my feet with greatest care, but the sun was warmer on my face than it ever had been, and above the heavy stink of coal smoke and brick dust, I could catch the smell of sagebrush on a hot breeze.
I’m sure you know where I ventured on those walks—every walk, for I had but one destination. I followed the well-trodden path to my true love’s grave. Bill no longer rested behind that little white church with the crick and the cottonwoods behind. They had dug him up and moved him to a grander new cemetery, and they fenced him in with wrought iron bars. But every day I was strong enough to walk, I went to him and leaned upon that fence, and read the words engraved upon his stone. We will meet again in the happy hunting ground to part no more. I read the words, and I whispered to his shade all the memories I held of his goodness and his beauty. I told him all the legends the writers had spun about us—Wild Bill and Calamity Jane. I promised I would come to find him soon—very soon—and we would part no more.
One day, when a train whistle died away and I heard a meadow lark trilling in the fleeting quiet, a famous photographer came wandering into the grand new cemetery with the black box of his camera resting on his shoulder.
“Land sakes,” he said, fairly dancing with excitement, “aren’t you Calamity Jane?”
I told him that I was indeed, the very same—though I wondered that he should recognize me, sick and wasted as I was.
“How fortunate that I should find you here, at Bill Hickock’s grave. Please, ma’am—won’t you allow me to make your picture? A moment like this oughtn’t to be forgotten.”
At first, I thought to cuss the man out and scare him away, for he had intruded most ungraciously on my private ruminations. But then I reasoned a photograph couldn’t hurt nobody, least of all me—not now, with the end so thoroughly nigh. Something of the old fun returned to me—those days when I still had admirers, when Calamity’s name hadn’t yet fallen under the shadow of complete and absolute iniquity. So I agreed, and I mustered the strength to stand up straight beside the wrought-iron fence and my true love’s grave. I even managed to smile for the camera.
But the photographer frowned as he bent over his apparatus. He straightened again with the flash unfired.
“No, no—it’s not quite right,” he muttered. “Not the right image—not yet. Something is missing. Ah!” He reached into the pocket of his well-tailored jacket and took out a silk flower. Then he came to me and pressed the flower in my hand. The petals was blue, sky-blue; I remembered the forget-me-nots growing beneath the willows, remembered the smell of their green weeping sap when I tore them up and gathered them in my hands.
“There, now,” the photographer said. “Lean over the fence, if you would, Miss Jane, and lay the flower on his stone.”
An artificial flower. An artificial world. Ain’t that just about right?
I’ve watched from thes
e hills while the city has grown. I’ve paced the old trails, even as they’ve vanished, fading under prairie grass or dug up and erased, paved over by the endless spread of asphalt. Vanished or erased, but my feet still know the way; a memory can’t be discarded, easy as that.
The West falls in upon itself. It thickens itself to legend. The people come in greater numbers, searching for me, searching for Bill, hungry for what we left behind. I watched the stage coaches turn to auto cars. I seen the birds in the sky replaced by roaring jets, the crisscross of persistent white smoke like the bars of a jail cell across’t the sky. You’re one of them, Short Pants—whatever your name is, whatever I should call you now. You’re just like the rest, all the ravenous souls who came here searching for me. Tenderfeet, the lot of you—you, the outsider, and all those who was born and bred here in Deadwood, too, these many years since my death. But the soles of my feet grow harder with every step along the invisible trails. I am firm like the stones beneath the Black Hills dirt—my soul, hard and hidden, the bones of this place.
They found me lying face down across a table in my favorite saloon, surrounded by dancing girls, my last breath accompanied by the purr of an old hurdy-gurdy. The whiskey glass beside me was only half-drunk.
You know, it’s a strange thing, but it takes some time to get used to being a specter. It don’t happen all at once, as you might imagine. You must be willed back into existence—brought back by memory, by the senses of those you left alive in this strange and deep-stained world. That’s the only way to find the path through the nap of your velvet. You follow the trails others have made, and you find yourself there—the real self, original and unchanged.
Because no one had yet folded the fabric of Calamity Jane and allowed me to find my path, I didn’t see my own funeral. I was blinded to it, unawares—but I saw a night sky arching high above the river. I felt the water on my bare skin. Silt ran smooth between my toes, and when I bent and reached into that cold current, I brought up a golden watch hanging from a chain. It dripped water dark as whiskey. But no matter how long I stared into the watch’s shining face, I never saw Wild Bill again.
Calamity Page 49
